Lab SchoolFermilab Visit Offers New View of Science for Alabama High School

by Mike Perricone

Their whirlwind tour took in Fermilab and Blue Man Group, particle
adventures and deep-dish pizza, neutrino experiments and Chicago’s
Navy Pier, cosmic rays and a stellar presentation of “Leon Lederman
Explains It All.”

Then it was back to Altamont School in Birmingham, Alabama, for
10 high-schoolers and two teachers who had the run of the laboratory —
or at least, were running all around the laboratory — from Monday to
Wednesday, September 30 to October 2 with representatives of Fermilab’s
Education Office as their tour guides.

It was the second Fermilab visit for students from the private school with an
enrollment of about 400. The first, a year ago at around the same time, came
about by way of the Web. Each department of the school has a week-long
trip in the autumn for a direct look at a relevant area of study (the French
Department,for example,goes to France), with the students paying their
own way.

Chemistry teacher Donna Kentros was browsing the Web, looking for a
destination for a science trip last year, when her interest was piqued by the
Fermilab home page. Kentros contacted Fermilab education director Marge
Bardeen, who put her in touch with education specialist Tom Jordan, who
began working on the logistics.

“We corresponded by email to plan the trip,” Kentros said.“Email is a
wonderful thing.”

This year’s trip had an extra-added attraction: spending Wednesday
morning in a chat with Lederman, Fermilab director emeritus and 1988 Nobel
Prize winner. Kentros took the suggestion of educational consultant Alan
November,of Wilmette, Ill., who offered a workshop presentation at Altamont
on using computer technology in the classroom. November suggested linking
up with Lederman for a visit at Fermilab, and Kentros again made the
connection by email.

Lederman took the students on a grand tour of the growth of scientific
thought, culminating in the “shower curtain” model of the Higgs field. The
Greek philosophers, he said, always wanted to know: Where is the simplicity?

“A theory is only good if it fits on a T-shirt,” Lederman said. “The Greeks
thought that when we find what we’re ultimately looking for, we’d be rolling
on the floor with laughter because it would be so simple, we’d wonder why it
took us so long to find out.”

Case in point: viewing the Higgs, postulated as the
source of mass for the other elementary particles,
as a rippled shower curtain. Our world looks
complicated, Lederman proposed, because we
see it through the Higgs field and its ripple effect.

“It’s like looking through a lucite shower curtain,”
he said.“If you turn on the bathroom light and look
through the shower curtain, you might see three
different points of light. Look through 10 shower
curtains and turn on the light,and you might see
a thousand points of light.”

Illustrating a point, Lederman drew a chart of the
Standard Model, circling the bottom quark and
muon neutrino,commenting: “By the way,
I discovered those two particles …”

“Dr.Lederman was definitely the highlight of
the trip,” said student Evan Calker.“He explains
physics in way that’s simple and fun. And when we
were eating lunch in the cafeteria, I looked around
and thought,‘This is, like, the top five percent of
intelligence in country.’”

Lederman took the opportunity to present one of
his favorite themes, restructuring the high school
science sequence to offer conceptual physics first,
as a foundation for chemistry and then biology,
which he termed the most complicated of the three
areas. A more advanced physics course could then
follow as an elective. He’s adamant about trying to
change the current sequence of biology, chemistry
and physics.

“It’s alphabetically correct,” Lederman said,“but
that sequence was designed in 1893, long before
what we know now of all those disciplines.
We recently had a time traveler from 1893 visit
the lab, and he was overwhelmed by the science
and technology, the cars, the cell phones, the
computers. He was in shock. So we took him to
a local high school, and when he saw the science
sequence, he calmed down and felt like he was
back home in 1893.”

Altamont physics teacher Warren Kinney
enthusiastically seconded the change in sequence.
“As a physics teacher, I want them to take physics
as soon as possible,” Kinney said,“so they can
make intelligent decisions about advanced topics
courses they might want to take. This year three
of my seniors are taking calculus-based physics,
which is essentially independent study, but I would
like them to get conceptual physics in the eighth
grade.”

Kinney also identified a key source of inertia.
“Some folks feel that because physics is a
challenging subject, it hurts the grade point
average of some children,” he said.“They ’re
concerned about information going out to colleges.
So they feel students shouldn’t take physics
until their senior year. Also, we have to gear
our teaching to the Advanced Placement tests,
which are given at that time.”

But for three days in Batavia, the Altamont
students had their own “special topics in physics ”
mini-course. On Monday the students toured
the 15th floor of Wilson Hall with its view of
the Tevatron and much of the site. They visited
the Linac and Main Control Room, and made
measurements with the QuarkNet classroom
cosmic ray detector. Later,they visited the
MiniBooNE neutrino experiment, hosted by
experiment collaborators Jocelyn Monroe of
Columbia University and Jennifer Rath of the
University of Cincinnati.

On Tuesday, they visited the Central Helium
Liquefier, guided by Jerry Makara.(“The group
showed a great interest in our large helium and
nitrogen liquefier plants, with very good questions,”
said Makara.“They’ll have a good future with their
inquisitive minds.”) Then they spent time analyzing
data from the cosmic ray detectors and from
accumulated data at the QuarkNet Online Cosmic
Ray Detector. They spent the afternoon viewing
NuMI detectors being assembled at the New Muon
Lab, with Cat James.(“This was a bright bunch of
kids.[They were] a lot of fun for me,” James said,
“because of their interest and the really good
questions they asked. Heck, I didn’t know this
stuff when I was in high school.”) They toured the
Feynman Computing Center with Lisa Giacchetti.
(“They were knowledgeable about computer
issues,” Giacchetti said.“When I said the PCs
ran Linux, they asked if it was RedHat.”)They
finished their Fermilab stay by spending the
morning with Lederman. Thursday was a Chicago
day to enjoy sights, sounds and tastes before flying
back early Friday morning.

“I think it ’s like going to a foreign country,” Kentros
said of the experience.“The trip takes some of the
romance out of it in a way. They think a foreign
country is going to be a certain way in your mind,
where everything is different. But when you get
there, you find out that it’s really just a lot of normal
people doing normal things.When they see the
way real science is done, perhaps they’ll think,
‘Hey,I could do this.’ In way, it does get them to
realize that science is something they can do,
something they can accomplish.”

And it sounded as if the message did hit home,
with a twist.

“This is where the stuff you learn in school
really happens,” said student Nirmal Choradia.
“So instead of learning in school, you can come
here and learn.”